Women’s basketball: Ruef says USC loss ‘woke us up’

Nashville — Sometimes a loss can be a good thing, and that’s how the Stanford women regard their upset loss to USC in the Pac-12 Tournament semifinals

“I think the number one thing it did was it kind of just woke us up,” center Mikaela Ruef said. “Like we were kind of playing in a daze a little bit. We were getting by in games, but we weren’t playing the way we should be playing.

” And I think losing there really like gave us a sense that our next loss is our last game of the season. And I think it really put a sense of urgency into everyone on the team to improve on what we could improve on in the two weeks we had from the loss to the beginning of the NCAA Tournament.”